Harry
Bruinius takes the title of his book,
Better
for All the World, from a quote from famous
United States
Supreme
Court Justice
Oliver
Wendell Holmes, Jr. In his opinion,
written for a court majority that authorized states to forcibly sterilize some
people, Holmes expressed the notion that it was better to sterilize a defective
person than to permit them to have defective children who may place greater
burden on
government
systems for
justice
and welfare.
This
legal
justification for forced sterilization was just one of the
policy
victories of the
eugenics
movement in the
America.
Eugenicists were also influential in establishing state
marriage
laws and
federal immigration quotas and restrictions.
Even from its start, notions of
social
engineering and
politics
tinged the
science
of eugenics.
Francis
Galton coined the word that applied to both the study of heredity and the
improvement of humanity through selective breeding over generations. Galton
established the field based on concepts from his cousin
Charles
Darwin’s books on evolution,
Gregor Mendel’s
studies of plant heredity, and his own
statistical
studies of human characteristics. Though he mostly kept these speculations to
himself, he considered the possibility of improving humans through breeding
just as farmers improved plants and livestock.
American reformers of all political persuasion welcomed Galton’s ideas;
they were looking for reliable, scientific means of tackling poverty and
crime.
Galton’s method were used to study families and supposedly proved that traits
related to poverty, criminality, low
intelligence,
and the harder to recognize (therefore more dangerous) feeblemindedness. These
studies also uncover a troubling pairing in females of feeblemindedness and
fecundity. The implication was that the good stock of moral, productive
Americans risked overrun by a class of hereditary degenerates. America’s best
needed to produce larger family, and its poor and feebleminded needed to be
restrained from passing on their inferior traits.
Much of Bruinius’ book focuses on this American eugenics movement.
Representing leadership in the scientific community is
Charles
Davenport. He popularized the work of Galton, convinced the Carnegie
Institute to fund a station to study eugenics, and did research that
contributed to the early development of
genetics.
Representing the bridge between science and policy is
Harry
Laughlin. A
Missourian
and a protégé of Davenport, his reports and advice to
Congress helped
to inform restrictive immigration policy and support state programs of forced
sterilization of convicts and the feebleminded, ultimately upheld in by the Supreme
Court, as previously mentioned, in the case of
Buck vs. Bell.
The development of eugenics policy in the U.S. was being watched
overseas. In particularly, racial purity laws enacted by the
Nazis in
Germany
explicitly cited American research and legal precedents. Many reformers in
America and elsewhere were gratified by the apparent success of eugenics
policies in Germany.
Even as it was reaching its peak as a political reform movement,
laboratory science was undermining eugenics. Laboratory studies of the
mechanisms of heredity, which had discovered chromosomes by the
1930s, were
showing that heredity and the expression of traits, especially
moral or
personality
traits, were much more complicated and harder to predict than the eugenicists
assumed. Through its association with the Nazis, eugenics became wholly
discredited in the public mind, though its effects lingered in American
policies for decades.
Our understanding of genetics and heredity has improved a lot.
Biotechnology has made a new kind of genetic engineering possible. The
eugenicist dreams of eliminating disease and creating better people in future
generations is more attainable than ever, at least in limited ways.
If this puts our evolution in our hands, are we
ethically
and morally evolved enough to use this power? Are humans intelligent animals or
are we unique creatures? Are human
rights
inalienable characteristics of human beings, or are they social constructs,
ideas that can rise, fade, or change like other ideas? How does the good of the
species relate to the good of the individual? What does it mean to be a
parent?
The way we answer these questions, and other related to the implications of our
science and
technology,
will establish what kind of people we are, and possibly the destiny of
generations to come.
If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
Bruinius, Harry.
Better for All
the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America’s Quest for
Racial Purity.
New York:
Alfred A.
Knopf,
2006.
